From Data to Differentiation: Making Literacy Assessments Work for You

When you use your literacy assessments to drive your teaching you can meet children where they are in their learning and keep them engaged. We are at the point in the school year where teachers have usually pre-taught expectations and behaviours and are ready to delve deeper into guided reading groups.

The goal for this post is to support you, as a new educator, as you learn how to use assessment information to build groupings aimed to differentiate your instruction across the class.

Incorporating Literacy Assessments

If you are in Alberta, we have standardized testing for alphabetic (LeNs), blending (CC3), and guidelines for reading assessments to use. If you are elsewhere, you are more than welcome to use my resources that cover the same material. (LINK)

Each of these assessments look into some of the different foundational skills children need as they begin to read. For a more in-depth understanding of these skills you will need to either continue assessing using different tools or look to the students’ abilities while they are reading.

WINK WINK use my assessment for help!

The level of books the student is able to read without frustration or difficulties can also point you in the direction of the skills to work on in your guided groups. For example, children that can read patterned books but struggle moving away from that would commonly need to work on sight words and sounding out. Once you have a good understanding of each student, it is time to organize them into groupings.

Using the data overall

Separate the students into groups based on their abilities such as missing certain letters/sounds, has challenges reading with expression, or difficulties sounding out. Ensure you have no more than 5-6 students in a group, it gets too busy and distracting otherwise.

If there are students that you still have questions about you can do some further investigation with my “literacy foundations assessment” tool, it goes into reading skills more in-depth so you can pinpoint where to focus your attention. If you are REALLY stuck with what to teach in, use the ‘literacy foundations assessment’ tool as a checklist for skills to work on. Also, this graphic is an excellent resource for your quick reference.Once you have your groups and focused on a certain skill you can organize WHEN/HOW you will meet with them.

What to do with the rest of the class?

This question gets asked a lot, even from experienced teachers, how do you ensure the rest of the class is focused on quality instructional activities while your focus is on the guided reading group? Good Question. This is where pre-teaching and practicing expectations will take time. Having quality activities (sight word spelling, literacy puzzles/dominoes, free writing, online reading programs, etc.) can help to ensure students are engaged and on-task.

These are some professional books that I found helpful when creating these activities.

If you want ready to go resources and are willing to pay for it these are some quality activities I have found over the years.

Putting it all Together

Now you have structured activities for students to be doing, everyone knows the routines and expectations, and you have gathered your students by ability groups. Teach them HOW and WHERE to meet you during their time with you (I like to have a quick activity for them to do while I settle the rest of the class). Then you can quickly delve into the reading lesson.

For more information about HOW to do guided reading lessons look to our upcoming post all about it in January.